Sarah Friedland

Fellows 2021
Choreographer and filmmaker, based in New York (USA)
Cooperating partner: Wen Hui und Eiko Otake

Cinematographer: Gabe C. Elder © Sarah Friedland

Sarah Friedland is a choreographer and filmmaker working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, dance, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements, gestures, and postures from cinema and archival footage, embodied memories, and contemporary dance languages, she choreographs through practices of interviewing, pre- and re-enactment, adaptation, and improvisational play, shaping dances with diverse communities of performers and movers—from profess- ional dancers to cohorts of seniors and teenagers.

Sarah is cooperating with movement-based interdisciplinary artists Wen Hui and Eiko Otake over a period of 14 months. Throughout this time, they will meet digitally every two months for eight discussions in total. Through their cooperation Sarah aims at expanding her investigation of the relationship between embodied memory, choreography, and non-fiction film practices. During their discussions they will address questions such as: “How does the embodied interview exist as both a practice of dance-making, and a performative form?”, “How does the camera stage duets between bodies and places?”.

Sarah's reports

Excerpt from A BODY, 2022 by Eiko Otake and Sarah Friedland from Sarah Friedland on Vimeo.

Eiko Otake and Sarah Friedland collaborated in creating A BODY, 2022, a 2-channel video installation in the gallery of the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Otake performs in a new, unadorned space as a way to explore and learn about the place. Friedland's camera observes Otake's body as she begins to inhabit the gallery landscape, witnessing her labor. The filming process was an improvisational duet between a cameraperson and a performer. Both think while they move.

Credits: Performance by Eiko Otake Camera by Sarah Friedland Edit by Sarah Friedland and Eiko Otake Produced by Elise Marie Butterfield Sound Recordists: Elise Marie Butterfield and Madison Nicole May

Behind the scenes at the video installation *A BODY* by Eiko Otake and Sarah Friedland

© Elise Marie Butterfield

Behind the scenes self-portrait of Sarah's shadow while filming Eiko

© Sarah Friedland

„An application that resounded with the Pina Bausch Fellowship’s 2021 briefing - that is - an online fellowship! The jury was inspired by Sarah’s commitment to expanded cinema practices. The jury was unanimous in Sarah’s choice of co-partners and the confidence she showed in her craft and the use of her co partner’s time and expertise.“
- Jury-Statement